Christianity

For churchgoers, Easter Day is a time of joy and celebration, usually with a thronged church, an immaculately conducted service, the fruit of weeks of preparation, and the chance to catch up with friends we haven’t seen for a while. In my Church, we are even lucky enough to have a slice or two of Fr. William’s home-made simnel cake. After the austerity of Lent and trials of Holy Week, Jesus jumps out of the papier maché Easter egg and shouts, “surprise!” It didn’t all end on Good Friday – he is risen indeed. Alleluia!

The reality of that first Easter was very different. It was a time of fear, with Jesus’ followers in hiding, hoping the crowds only slowly departing from Jerusalem after the religious festival would help them stay below the radar. The capital was the stronghold of those Christ had spent his ministry criticising. His supporters’ hopes that he was the promised Messiah had been crucified along with Christ himself. Dare they presume that the whole episode was unimportant enough that they could keep their heads low for a while, before retreating back to the Galilee when the coast cleared? Or would the apparatus of the state stumble upon them, and decide that a few more needed to die for the sake of the whole people?

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In English, the Apostle’s Creed teaches that Jesus descended “to the dead” or “into hell” depending on which version we use. However, the Greek version states that “κατελθοντα εις τα κατωτατα”, “he went down to the lowest”. At least since the second Century, many Christians have believed that Christ descended literally into the underworld, and preached to the dead.

The ‘Harrowing of Hell’, as it is often called, is particularly important in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, where the great Easter sermon of St. John Chrysostom, dating from around the year 400, is preached every year at Easter Eve.

For Chrysostom, this is the moment where Christ literally enters Hell and takes it prisoner, binding the Devil and death in chains. “He descended into Hades and took Hades captive!” Easter Eve is where the eternal life-giving force of God meets the power that death and evil have in time, and destroys them. This is the great mystery of the Christian faith – by dying Christ destroyed our death. By embracing, of His own free will, the power of evil to wound and destroy, Christ annihilated that power.

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At times, life consists of one painful episode after another. Troubles multiply, sometimes emotional, sometimes financial, sometimes with our health, and as they do, friends seem vanish like frost off the road on a sunny morning. At first we try to keep our chin up, to meet problems one by one, and ask for assistance in prayer. But things just get worse, and the most difficult thing of all seems to be that we often suffer not because we have been selfish or greedy, but because we are trying to do the right thing.

We have been told that God hears the prayers of those who ask in faith, and when those prayers seem to go unanswered, we quite naturally feel abandoned by God. Sometimes we get very angry at God. Afflicted by one painful illness after another, St. Teresa of Ávila shouted at God, “If this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so many enemies.”

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‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you’ The Last Supper was, first and foremost, an act of Christ’s love, and not just for his friends. “But see, the one who betrays me is with me, and his hand is on the table.” At that very first Communion, Christ shared his body and blood even with Judas, who was to hand Him over to his death within hours. None of us is worthy to share this great Sacrament with Christ, and all of us are invited to eat with him anyway. This is, after all, the God who when he walked the earth, was constantly criticised for sharing meals with prostitutes, tax-collectors, Roman soldiers and other ‘undesirables’.

For some reason, pretty much all Churches tend to ignore this lesson. There is always somebody who is considered especially ‘unworthy’ and kept away from the Lord’s Table. At its worst, this reduces the Sacrament to a tool in a game of punishment and reward. Not only is the ‘punishment’ side of the game foreign to the way of life that Jesus modelled for us in the Scriptures, but seeing the Sacrament as a ‘reward’ for sufficiently good behaviour or doctrinal purity is fraught with spiritual dangers. The Sacrament is not a magic token. It does not in and of itself make us ‘better’. If we think it does, we are setting ourselves up for a fall.

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Christians don’t really know how to handle Biblical prophecy. A minority tradition in the Church tends to claim the events related in it will ‘come true’ next Wednesday morning when we’re sitting down to our Corn Flakes. The entertainment value when these predictions, inevitably, don’t come to pass perhaps explains why this tiny minority has tended to have the most publicity over the past two millennia. A brief scan of church history will confirm that abusing Biblical prophecy to promote nonsense – and often politically motivated, violent, nonsense – did not begin with the Left Behind novels.

The majority Christian tradition tends to avoid the subject of prophecy as much as possible, in part because it is put off by the craziness spouted by the publicity seekers, but perhaps also because Bible prophecy is anything but cosy. Prophecy describes God’s purposes being brought to fruition in a vortex of death and destruction, at a time people will wish they had never been born – where being a Christian won’t be the lucky charm against suffering we like to pretend it is, but a magnet attracting it. Rather than locating the events of prophecy in the near future as the lunatic fringe does, most of us prefer to keep them in the distant past, usually the destruction of the Temple by the Romans and the persecutions of Christians under mad, bad, Emperor Nero.

Either option locates the truth of prophecy somewhere comfortable for us, where we won’t stand in the path of the deluge when it arrives. Either it all happened a long time ago, or we’re the good guys who’ll prevail in the end and reign with Jesus very soon now.

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St. John’s story of Holy Week has important differences to the tale told by the authors of the other Gospels, and its stories are perhaps a little less familiar to people, especially if they aren’t regular Bible readers.

One incident not recorded in the other Gospels is that of the visitors to Jerusalem who wanted to see Jesus. These were Greeks, in town to worship at the Passover festival, who approached Philip to seek an audience with the preacher who had so recently electrified the city. Philip and Andrew went to tell Jesus about them, and at this point the Greeks disappear from the story. We do not know whether they ever got to see Christ.

Instead, John retells Jesus replying with a discourse clearly alluding to the coming agony of Good Friday – “unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains that and nothing more; but if it dies, it bears a rich harvest.”  Why respond in such a curiously sideward way? Perhaps, this a case of Jesus, the King of Kings and Son of David, the culmination  of the ethnocentric religion of Israel, dying to give life to a harvest of believers from all nations. And here is the soil in which that harvest will begin to ripen, citizens of the multi-ethnic Roman Empire already drawn to worship of the God of Abraham and Isaac even before the establishment of Christianity.

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Having spent the night after the dramatic events of Palm Sunday in Bethany, about a half-hour walk from Jerusalem, Jesus returns to the capital in the morning to preach in the Temple. Fig Monday is a day of parables, especially in Matthew’s Gospel, and many of those parables are difficult, not least the story from which the day gets its name, where Jesus, feeling peckish, stops for a snack and causes a fig tree to wither away because it had no fruit.

Let us instead turn to one which, at first glance, keeps us on familiar territory in the Gospel narratives – the Parable of the Two Sons.

A man with two sons asks them both to go and work in his vineyard. One says he will but doesn’t; the other says he won’t, but changes his mind later and gets stuck in. The latter, obviously, was the one doing what his father wanted. Jesus then tells the ‘chief-priests and elders of the nation’ that tax-collectors and prostitutes are entering the Kingdom of God ahead of them: even before Jesus began his public ministry, they listened to John the Baptist when he showed them they right way to live, while the religious élite refused to believe that they were not already living correctly.

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